Novels by StaryUll

A gray haze blanketed the sea like a rotting shroud. The water was black, viscous, and smelled of iron. The lifeboat drifted without direction, creaking each time a small wave struck its cracked hull. Elios sat along the side, his back pressed against damp wood. His breathing was heavy. His combat jacket was torn in several places, the blood dried into black crust. His eyes were sunken, but still alert. Vera lay at the bottom of the boat, wrapped in an emergency blanket that had long since turned gray. Her lips were cracked. “You… still alive?” Elios’s voice rasped. Vera moved a finger. “Unfortunately… yeah.” “Good.” “I was hoping you’d say ‘thank God’ or something.” Elios snorted. “I’m an atheist.” The fog shifted. The sun was nothing more than a pale shadow behind volcanic ash clouds. No direction. No birds. No wind. Just a dead sea. Vera licked her lips. “Water?” Elios lifted an empty plastic bottle and shook it. No sound. “Fuck,” Ver

The purple light was blinding, hot, and promised the end of all the pain crushing him.Elios shut his eyes tightly. He could feel the Chaos energy gathering in Lyra’s palm, his wife, his queen, and now his executioner. The power was ready to erase his existence down to the last atom.He was not afraid of dying.He was simply tired. Very tired.Sleep well, my love, Elios whispered silently to himself.But the death he had been waiting for never came.Another apocalypse arrived first.GGRRRRRRR-BOOOOOM!It was not the explosion from Lyra’s hand. The thunderous roar came from below, from the deepest belly of the earth. The sabotage Elios had planted in the main reactor twenty minutes earlier had finally reached its climax.The reactor core, stripped of its cooling system, did not merely melt down. It detonated violently, triggering a chain reaction that shattered the tectonic foundation beneath Facility Zero.The floor of the frozen crater split apart with a deafening crack.KRAAAK!The

Thick purple smoke shrouded the Ice Crater, swirling like a nebula storm in a vacuum.Lyra’s colossal body, which had filled the horizon moments ago, was shrinking at an unnatural speed. Flesh, bone, and muscle compressed inward with a series of wet, sickening cracks, the sound of biological matter being forcibly reshaped.Elios lost his footing. The giant’s back he had been standing on vanished beneath him.He fell.But he did not plunge into the abyss.The gravitational field around Lyra was still unstable from the removal of the Holy Iron Stake. Fragments of the platform, slabs of ice, and Elios himself floated in the air, suspended in weightless stasis.At the center of the vortex of dust and energy, a new figure took shape.No longer twenty meters tall. Now human in scale.A woman hovered before Elios.Her skin was pale gray, hard as marble yet smooth as silk.A pair of jet-black wings, now proportionate to her body, spread wide behind her, beating slowly to hold her position in

Thud. Landing on the back of a giant demon felt exactly like hitting asphalt coated in dry ice. Hard, freezing, and searing against the skin. Elios slammed onto Lyra’s left shoulder. His metal-plated hand grabbed whatever it could find, in this case a thick clump of black hair sprouting from the pale flesh of the Queen. “Ugh.” Vera landed beside him, skidding across the slick, mucus-slick surface of her skin. “Hold on, Vera! Don’t fall!” Elios shouted, catching Vera’s ankle with his still weakened left hand. Feeling parasites clinging to her body, Lyra roared in fury. She shook herself in violent spasms. It was like riding a wild horse during a magnitude nine earthquake. “GET… OFF… ME… LICE!” The Legion’s voice detonated inside their skulls, blurring Elios’s vision. “Sorry, honey! I’m not really in the mood for social distancing!” Elios shot back, his teeth rattling from the tremors. Above them, the three Church gunships that had been spewing lethal firepower suddenly ceased

Falling felt like being pulled back into the cold womb of the earth.There was no scream. The wind roared too violently in Elios’s ears, stealing his voice. Shards of glass and steel from the shattered observation balcony fell with him like an artificial meteor shower.Below, the darkness of the icy crater yawned open. At its center, Lyra’s colossal form glowed violet, waiting for her prey to fall within reach.Elios saw Vera three meters beneath him, her body spinning uncontrollably in midair.“Vera!” Elios screamed in his mind.His human left hand was useless. His right was metal.He did the only thing that metal hand could do.Mid-fall, Elios reached behind his belt and yanked free the portable grappling hook launcher he had taken from the corpse of a Paladin at the docks.He aimed. Not at the distant ice wall, but at one of the massive golden chains still restraining Lyra’s body, a chain stretching horizonta

A high pitched ringing filled Elios’s ears, drowning out the facility alarms still wailing in the distance.“…lios! Elios! Wake up!”The voice sounded as if it were coming from underwater. Hands were shaking his shoulder in panic.Elios’s eyes snapped open. He dragged in a sharp breath as if surfacing from the depths of the ocean. Cold air mixed with concrete dust stabbed into his lungs.The first thing he saw was Vera’s face.The female agent was kneeling beside him. White dust coated her features, dried blood clung to the corner of her mouth, and her right shoulder, where Elios had shot her, was wrapped in a hastily applied bandage already blooming red.“I’m… I’m still alive?” Elios croaked. He tried to sit up, but the world spun violently.“You were thrown five meters. Your head hit the wall. Mild concussion,” Vera reported, her voice trembling between relief and pain as she helped him upright. “If you had not woken u

Data Node Alpha did not look like a building. It looked like a graphical error in the middle of the desert. Its form was a massive rectangular monolith, fifty meters tall, hovering motionless about a meter above the default white ground. Its surface was not concrete or steel, but a matte black material that absorbed light, traced with white circuit lines flowing like cascading data streams. There were no doors. No windows. No vents. Only a low hum, a steady vibration that made teeth ache. Oliver lay prone behind a mound of broken concrete at the edge of the white zone. He peered through a gap in the rubble, his glitching eyes, one faded blue, one a static wireframe, analyzing the alien structure. “There it is,” Oliver whispered. “The substation. A local server feeding power to the Spire.” “It’s huge,” Claire said beside him, tying a dirty bandage around her scraped arm. “And no guards? That’s weird. The Architect usually scatters geometry drones everywhere.

Thirst was not just a dry throat. In this broken world, thirst was a death alarm ringing constantly at the back of your mind. Oliver sat cross-legged atop a pile of concrete rubble in the corner of a dark subway tunnel. In front of him was a cracked plastic bucket, completely empty. Around him, the faint sounds of refugees echoed. A child cried for water. An old man coughed dryly. Someone threw an empty bottle in frustration. “The water’s gone, Boss,” Griz reported. The goblin ghost floated beside Oliver, his translucent face grim. “The supply from the fire tank is dry. And out there… the Architect erased Lake Mead. Completely gone. Now it’s just a giant white hole on the map.” Oliver did not respond. He just stared at the empty bucket. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Dry. Bitter. He looked at his hands. His right hand, severed, still wrapped in dirty bandages. His left hand, missing its ring finger, trembled on his knee. “System…” Oliver whisper

The wind at the boundary between the “Real World” and the “White World” felt wrong. On one side, it carried concrete dust, the smell of burned trash, and the familiar heat of the Nevada desert. On the other side, across the newly formatted white plain, the air was… sterile. No scent. No temperature. It felt like standing in front of a massive air conditioner blowing empty space. Oliver stood on that dividing line. His left foot rested on cracked Vegas asphalt. His right foot stood on the default white texture. “They’re fast,” Oliver muttered. His eyes, now flickering with glitching pupils that shifted between blue and static, scanned the horizon. “Half the city gone in a week.” “Six days, four hours,” Claire corrected. She reloaded her makeshift pistol, a weapon built from metal pipes and door springs since factory firearms had been deleted. “And they don’t stop. Those geometry machines work twenty-four seven. No sleep. No fuel.” Claire turned and signaled her

The sound arrived before the form. KRRRR-ZZZT-KRRRR... It sounded like a broken hard drive forced to spin, mixed with the scream of a dial-up modem at maximum volume. The noise made teeth ache and sent ripples through the data sea around the junk ship, raising waves that shattered into tiny pixel squares. “They’re here!” Griz shouted from behind the old bus steering wheel that served as the helm. “Six o’clock! Nine! Twelve! Damn it, they’re everywhere!” Oliver stood at the bow, his wireframe feet planted against the deck slick with splashes of data. The Void wind hit his face, but there was no heat or cold. Only static. He looked down at the churning purple surface below. Shapes moved within the waves. Debuggers. They were not ordinary animals. They were biomechanical nightmares. Their bodies were made of tangled black fiber-optic cables forming synthetic muscle. No skin. No fur. Only cables and chrome plates glowing red. Their heads had no eyes

The sea wasn’t wet. That was the first thing Oliver realized when he tried to wipe the “water” splashing against his wireframe face. The liquid didn’t leave any trace of moisture or cold. It felt like… static. Like when your leg falls asleep and then the blood starts rushing back in. Zzzzt. Oliver sat on the deck of a ship made from stitched-together scraps, neon billboards, junk car doors, and fragments of satellites bound with glowing data cables. The ship, if this heap of garbage could even be called one, rocked on waves that constantly shifted colors. Purple, neon green, magenta, then suddenly pixelated black and white. “Don’t drink it, Boss,” a shrill voice called from behind him. “That’s not seawater. That’s raw data. If you drink it, you’ll be vomiting binary code for a week.” Oliver turned slowly. His neck made a digital cracking sound. Standing atop a cargo crate hovering a few inches above the deck was Griz. The goblin accountant looked different.

White. White again. But this was not the cold, sharp white of snow in Sloth’s arena. This was not the radiant white of heaven’s light promising salvation. This was the white of a blank sheet. Oliver opened his eyes, or at least he felt like he did. There were no eyelids blinking, no sensation of facial muscles moving. His awareness simply snapped online in the middle of a void with no corners, no shadows, no gravity. “Hello?” Oliver called out. No sound came. There was no air to vibrate his vocal cords. His thoughts echoed only within his own skull, bouncing against imaginary walls. He tried to move. His legs, which should have been broken and in a cast, felt nothing. His right hand, which should have been gone, felt whole. Oliver looked down. His body was there. But his body was... a wireframe. A skeletal structure of glowing blue lines forming the silhouette of a human. No flesh, no blood, no clothes. He was naked in pure data form.